meridian documentation
Guides for using the dashboard, subscriptions, and API behaviour.
Getting started
meridian is a weather dashboard for several places at once. Search for a city, open its page, pin it to Your locations, and keep an eye on temperature, conditions, and short forecasts. You do not need an account. Your pinned cities and most preferences stay on this device.
Dashboard
Top to bottom: 1. Hero — welcome text, search, and a quick location weather check. 2. Your locations — weather cards for the places you pinned. 3. Nearby & popular — two columns: Near you and Popular searches. 4. A dashboard ad placeholder (or live AdSense when configured). 5. Journal — a short article carousel. Operators can hide the ad and Journal with NEXT_PUBLIC_SHOW_HOME_STRETCH=0 for a leaner home page.
City detail
Search results and home cards open a page for that place. You do not need to pin a city to view it. Pinning only adds it to Your locations on the home page. A few showcase cities and places already known to the site always open; unknown addresses show a helpful empty state or 404.
Subscriptions
You can ask meridian to email you — no login required. Choose a newsletter about the product, a weekly digest for a pinned city, and/or weather alerts when conditions match what you care about. Everything is opt-in; every email includes a way to stop.
Monetization & consent
meridian runs as a free weather site. There is no working Premium checkout or paid plan that removes ads. Advertising only appears if you allow advertising consent and the operator configured Google AdSense.
Weather icons
Weather pictures on cards and forecasts are clear line/fill icons (Meteocons by Bas Milius, MIT licence). They show sunny, cloudy, rain, snow, fog, and similar conditions next to the written description — the text still carries the meaning if an image fails to load.
Nearby & popular
Under Your locations the home page shows two short lists of places. Near you — suggested places near your home or region, with live conditions. This is not a private log of everything you searched. Popular searches — places that are searched often on this site. Again, this is site-wide, not “your personal history.”
Forecasts & cache
Everyday visitors can skip this page. It explains how the site stores and refreshes weather data for people who run or integrate meridian. In plain terms: your browser remembers a recent reading; the server also remembers shared readings so we do not call the weather provider on every click.
API limits
This page is for people running the site. Visited weather data is shared and cache-friendly so free-tier OpenWeather limits (default 1000 calls/day) are less likely to be burned.
API reference
This page is for developers and operators integrating with meridian APIs — everyday visitors can skip it. All API routes are Next.js App Router handlers under src/app/api/. Weather and geocode require OPENWEATHER_API_KEY. Cron routes require Authorization: Bearer CRON_SECRET. Admin routes require an authenticated admin session cookie (meridian_admin_session) after login at /login, unless ALLOW_DEV_ADMIN_BYPASS applies in development.
Deployment & environment
This page is for people deploying meridian. Everyday visitors do not need these settings. A working demo needs only OPENWEATHER_API_KEY; everything else is optional stretch.